Barely into the new academic year and already thinking about the next one. Course planning has to start early at a university where a relatively small corps of full time faculty are stretched across many programs and divisions, so the ULEC program to which I regularly contribute (Job and the Arts, and the New School History class) sent feelers out this week. As it happened, their query arrived just as I was preparing the reading from Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions for "Theorizing Religion."Unlike many religious studies folks in small programs, I've never had to teach the survey course of world religions which is the staple of most programs, and a feature of many American undergraduate educations. Like folks in bigger departments, I get instead to teach how problematic any such course must be. And yet I'm aware that any course at the introductory college level must be problematic - and that that can in part be remedied by making those problems a part of the discussion. Presumably there are ways of doing this for the world religions course so many students want. (More than half my students in any given class are there because "I've always wanted to take a course on religion.") For various reasons I've toyed with the idea of concocting a world religions lecture course for the New School for years, and this year I think I got there. Here's what I proposed:
I'd like very much to design a religion course appropriate for this school and this moment for Spring 2021. It would provincialize western, especially US, understandings of religion, world religions and religious liberty; consider the emergence of new religions, secularisms and indigeneities in our own time; and look to the Anthropocene future.
"World religions," indeed "religion," could be in the middle section of the course, engaged as compelling constellations whose rise and fall we chart! And my "Religion and the Anthropocene" questions could form the final section: what resources, in "world religions" or "new religions" or anywhere else, might help us in a time of anthropogenic climate crisis?
Working title (an homage to Alasdair Macintyre): "After Religion."
